In keeping with said exploration, henceforth – or more accurately retrospectively – the chief marketing officer shall be known as the Lord of Mercantile Message Conveyance, or LMMC.
Background
The world is on the eve of a stupendous social change. The old delusions of seclusion, exclusion, restriction, interference and protection are waxing old, and are even now ready to vanish away.
To push inclusive conversations forward, newspapers have become more necessary in proportion as men become more equal and individuals more feared.
But to suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance; they maintain civilisation. Hence the creation of The Economist, or The Political, Commercial, Agricultural and Free-Trade Journal.
A decidedly verbose title, yet quite accurate in its description of the journal’s contents.
Business challenge
Circulate the 6d weekly publication by harnessing its enlightening articles, such as "Our expiring commercial treaty with the Brazils", "Renewed commercial negotiations with Portugal" and "Production of beetroot and consumption of sugar in the state of the German customs union", as well as train timetables.
Insight
If we make ourselves too little for the sphere of our duty; if, on the contrary, we do not stretch and expand our minds to the compass of their object; be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.
It is not a predilection to mean, sordid, home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great empire must fall by mean reparation upon mighty ruins.
(In full disclosure, the LLMC has not crafted this insight, but rather "borrowed" it from the formidable Edmund Burke.)
Objective
To induce liberal-minded citizens’ engagement in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance, which obstructs our progress.
Audience
Freethinkers, free-traders, colonial migrants, bewhiskered gentlemen, Whigs, workers, chuckaboos sipping port, players of respectable parlour games including Charades, Lookabout and Squeak Piggy Squeak.
Media
Pamphlets, broadsides, calling cards, electric telegraph, word of mouth, colloquy in gentlemen’s clubs and coffee houses, bell-daddled town cryers
Budget
Three one-hundred-and-twentieths of a guinea.
Mark Cripps is the chief marketing officer of The Economist, which celebrates its 175th anniversary on 15 September. Illustration by The Economist's official cartoonist KAL